I can't speak for Marius but I can say that "in the (hardcore) Linux world" Free has generally meant libre rather than gratis, except where specifically stated. I hope that the quotes and a parenthetical qualifier for that judging statement show that I am not implying anything good or bad about people who do or do not know the distinguishment. This can be viewed as such a common assumption that when we talk about "free" and "non-free" we mistakenly make the assumption that everyone knows which definition we are using. This might come up more frequently as Maemo grows from being "mostly used by Linux geeks."
Please reread Marius' email in that context. I do not think there is malice in his words. As for the value in switching from libre to gratis... Maemo was based on a desktop distribution called Debian which has a strong Free Software (libre) culture. This is where the tradition of "free" and "non-free" repos comes from. Personally I think switching from the repos meaning libre to gratis would add as much confusion as they do now because of Maemo's history. I'm not too sure what would be the point of a non-free (non-gratis) repository as I doubt maemo.org is going to open up an app store and be a means of for-profit distribution especially on Nokia's dime in competition to Ovi. Besides historical reasons in distinguishing free (libre) and non-free (non-libre), I would think it it would mostly matter to community members and mean zilch to end-users. I know there has been discussion of a different QA process for non-free (non-libre) due to its nature but I stopped following the QA process discussions and do not know what the resolution was. I would imagine it would make a big difference to Mer as it would represent packages that the community could auto-rebuild for other architectures or crowd-source if any porting effort was needed. I hope this helped in someway. Ed Page (epage) _______________________________________________ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
